The £1 coins you need to hang onto

From next month only the new 12-sided £1 coin will be legal tender (Photo Illustration by Jack Taylor/Getty Images)

There is now less than a month until the old, round £1 coin leaves circulation.

After 15th October, you won’t be able to spend those coins in shops across the UK, so many of us are now in a hurry to get rid of them as quickly as we can.

However, as the coin experts at ChangeChecker.org have pointed out, there are some designs of the ’round pound’ that might be worth keeping hold of.

The capital city coins

Credit: ChangeChecker.org

Three special ‘capital city’ versions of the £1 coin were released in 2010 and 2011, with very limited mintages, which only adds to their appeal. First was the London City coin, which had a mintage of £2,635,000, and which has got a ‘scarcity score’ of 77/100 according to ChangeChecker, who reckon you could sell it for between £5 and £8.

The Cardiff City coin is also worth looking out for. This had an even smaller mintage of £1,615,000, and depicts the circular coat of arms of Cardiff. It is the second scarcest £1 coin according to ChangeChecker, with a score of 88. Released in 2011, this £1 will fetch anything from £11 to £15.

Finally on the capital city theme is the Edinburgh City coin, which was also released in 2011 with a mintage of just £935,000. ChangeChecker have given it a perfect scarcity score of 100, and reckon the coin is actually worth between £12 and £16.

Other rare £1 coins

Credit: ChangeChecker.org

There are two more £1 variants that are well worth hanging onto. The first is the Scotland: Thistle and Bluebell coin which – you guessed it – has an image of a thistle alongside a bluebell in order to represent Scotland. Issued in 2014 as part of a floral emblems series, this coin had a mintage of £5,185,000 and has a scarcity score of 55.

Lastly there’s the UK Crowned Shield coin. Issued back in 1988, it had a mintage in excess of £7 million. While this in theory isn’t the scarcest coin around, ChangeChecker noted that only a quarter of users say they have the coin in their collection and swap requests outnumber swap listings by six to one. As a result, the site reckons it could sell for between £3 and £5.50.

The end of the old £1 coin

The round £1 coin is being replaced with the 12-sided £1 coin which was initially released back in March and has been in ‘co-circulation’ with the old version ever since.

It has been described as the most secure coin in history, as a result of its shape and the fact it is made from two different metals. In contrast, the Royal Mint reckons as many as one in 30 of the old £1 coins are in fact a fake.